It's too hefty and costly and power-hungry to best the leading tablet, Apple's full-size iPad. It is also too difficult to use in your lap. It's something of a tweener -- a compromised tablet and a compromised laptop.

The iPad mini is the best tablet to get and lets be honest, it's way better than the full sized iPad for nearly everyone. I'd even go so far as to say that the full sized iPad is plain obscene after using the mini.

I'm embarrassed to say this because I've been part of the problem by not talking enough about the heft. But the truth is that we've all been overlooking the iPad's weight because everything else was good about it. It's not anyone's fault-it's physics and trade offs that make a 10-inch tablet weigh this much when its made of these materials with a battery life this long. It was the best tablet for most, because it was the only one to get with iOS and its amazing library of apps and great hardware. But I can't say the heft is ok anymore. You didn't hold it like a magazine, which is the dream of a tablet, because it weighed as much as coffee tablet book or a small telephone book. You can agree or disagree, but it's indisputable that the mini is a better hold because you don't have to grip it like a steering wheel or like an underpowered circus strongman. And what good is a mobile gadget if its hard to carry and hold?

It feels good to hold in your hands. That soft backing strikes me as decidedly different than other tablets in its class, and seems far more smudge resistant than something like the Fire. The bezel on the front looks a bit too large for the screen size, though when reading a book I found the extra real estate helpful because I had something to grip (in fact, Duarte told me that the design was intentional, not a victim of cheap parts). There are a few very minor build issues, like the fact that the display can give a little and cause the LCD to ripple if you really press hard against the screen, but most users will never press hard enough to notice.

In all, I'm impressed by what Asus and Google have done with the Nexus 7. It's a classy, well-made product from a design standpoint. It may not be the most original, thinnest, or lightest tablet on the market, but it's certainly a respectable and refined entrant to the race. Bottom line - this is a much better feeling and looking tablet than anything else in its price range.

According to an allegedly leaked training document, this is Google's new tablet, a 7-inch Tegra 3 device running Android Jelly Bean. The document says that Nexus 7-as it is named-would hit the streets in July for $200.

As rumoured, Google is allegedly going to announce a 7-inch, Nexus-branded tablet called the Nexus 7. According to this supposed leak, it's built by Asus, with a 1.3Ghz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, GeForce 12-core GPU and 1GB of RAM with two different storage variants: 8GB and 16GB.

The Nexus tablet will also feature NFC and run Google Wallet (probably only in the US) and Android Beam.

The screen is an IPS display with a 178-degree viewing angle, running a resolution of 1280 by 800. The device will also sport a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera. The battery will also give you 9 hours worth of operation.

The 8GB model will set you back $199 USD and the 16GB will cost $249 USD. No word in the document on local prices.

1. Twice the LEDs: That means more heat coming from more LEDs. This is especially a problem at full brightness.

2. 2.5X the power needed: The brightness efficiency is lower because the new iPad has more pixels (which means more transistors) compared to the iPad 2. More pixels and transistors take up more space, meaning less opportunity for light to pass. "So they basically have to blast light through the LCD to make it come out." Soneira adds: "I measured the LED power at maximum brightness–it's two and a half times greater than on the iPad 2."

3. Battery generates more juice: The battery has to push out more power. This makes the battery warmer.

4. Traditional LCD technology: Sharp's power-efficient IGZO technology was not ready for the new iPad. That forced Apple to use traditional–and less power efficient–amorphous silicon tech.[To be fair the older iPads also used this tech but perhaps Apple was hoping to go 100% IGZO to offset the above].

Short term, that may be a little confusing. Presumably, Apple will eventually quit calling this thing "the new iPad" and just refer to it as the iPad. And when it does, that's going to be kind of weird because Apple is still selling the iPad 2. (At least for now.) In six months, will you be choosing between an iPad and an iPad 2, with the iPad being the newer, better model? Do they just plan on calling it "new" until iPad 2 inventory runs dry? That's going to take some shaking out.

But long term, it makes sense. Think about the iPhone. The iPhone 4S is the fifth generation iPhone, which would make an iPhone 5, if there was to be one, the sixth generation iPhone. See? Confusing! Which is why folks are already predicting that the next iPhone will simply be called iPhone, and not iPhone 5. Simple.

The silicone case is nice, and likely produces the indestructibility Negroponte covets. It's not simply a box-top; you can see in the picture above (high resolution versions below) that one side has a curved cut in it; this will allow the user to choose whether the ports on the top are exposed or protected. Useful for all manner of things, I'm sure. The pattern on it looks like a solar cell, but it seems unlikely that an array of any efficiency could be shipped for as low a price as they'd want.

Lastly there are the ports themselves: power, full-size USB (good for accessories), two ports which are likely audio out and in (or possibly both out, I can see that being a requested feature), and something that looks like a MicroSD slot, though I can't be sure. There also appears to be a front-facing camera at the top.

Please join us for an invitation-only event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco on March 2 at 10:00 a.m. Registration begins at 9:00 a.m. Please arrive early. RSVP to rsvp_media@apple.com.

When it comes to immersing yourself in a news story, look no further than the source you trust: The Washington Post. Experience our award-winning journalism on a wide range of subjects including national news, politics, opinion, business, sports, entertainment and food. Read stories from your favorite reporters, columnists and bloggers like Chris Cillizza, Eugene Robinson, Kathleen Parker, Michael Wilbon, Ezra Klein and Carolyn Hax.

closer to the story with our Live Topics feature. It combines the best coverage of the most
talked-about news of the day with social media conversations from Twitter and Facebook. Enjoy rich photo galleries with work from our renowned photojournalists and extensive video content so you can go deeper into every angle of every story. Download stories to read later, even when you are offline.

Once you download the app, in order to explore our content, simply log in with an existing washingtonpost.com account or register within the app.

A complimentary full-access subscription to The Washington Post app for iPad is provided until Feb.15, 2011, after which time there will be a fee for full access. This app is ad-supported.

I suspect – will seem like great news to publishers, who are increasingly frustrated by Amazon's control over the ebook market. Having made a mental and financial commitment to their iPads, readers are unlikely to retreat back to their Kindles when their eyes start to hurt trying to read hundreds of pages on Apple's device. Instead they'll return briefly to physical books to scratch their long-form itch. They're still portable, affordable and readable – and carrying one with you doesn't feel like wasted space in a way that carrying a Kindle and an iPad would. Physical book sales will rise, Kindle sales will drop.

Soon though, especially as more and more commuter friendly apps appear on the iPad and publishers push out more video content to further distract us from the need to read for prolonged periods, the idea of carrying a book will go back to seeming unnecessary.

And at that point the iPad will indeed have killed the Kindle. But, for millions of casual readers, it will also have killed something far more valuable: the experience of reading for pleasure.

It's not a problem that the experience of reading a book 'cover to cover' on an iPad isn't that great as long as there are better ways to communicate on the device. On the iPad there are. What's challenging for authors at this point is the iPad enables so many different types of expression that it’s literally overwhelming. Once you start thinking of your book as an app you run into all kinds of bizarre questions. Like, do I need to have all of my book accessible at any given time? Why not make it like a game so that in order to get to the next 'chapter' you need to pass a test? Does the content of the book even need to be created entirely by me? Can I leave some parts of it open to edit by those who buy it and read it? Do I need to charge $9.99, or can I charge $99.99? Start thinking about how each and everyone one of the iPad’s features can be a tool for an author to more lucidly express whatever it is they want to express and you'll see that reading isn't 'dead', it's just getting more sophisticated.

Remember, the same thing happened with the iPod Touch, Apple's iPhone-based PDA. The first-generation iPod Touch could play only a few sounds and even then only at a whisper, so its calendar alarms and new-email alerts were useless unless you wearing its earphones. You couldn't change the volume without using the touchscreen - a real issue when driving, jogging, or carrying groceries. There was no microphone, so you couldn't take voice memos or use services like Skype. (Apple even blocked external microphones from working on it!) Despite Apple making sure each iPhone OS revision has continued to support the first-generation iPod Touch, those hardware limits remain in the actual devices. You can bet that similar types of issue will be discovered in the first iPad.

By now, we've all seen the iPad and know just about everything about it that we possibly can. But did you know that the secretive company may actually be hard at work on a second device already? Now, before I say anything else, take this information with a grain of salt. While it originated from a good source, it was a second-hand source. Meanwhile, I've corroborated some the main details with another source, but not some of the smaller ones. That said, from what I'm hearing, Apple is pretty far along on work on second tablet device. A bigger one. And this one may be much more like a Mac than an iPhone.

It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves - the user interface was intuitive enough that people "got it" without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.

Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We'd put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.

Apple on Thursday made a subtle-yet-major revision to its App Store policy, enabling extra content to be sold through free iPhone apps. It's a move that immediately impacts the publishing industry, and it could pay even bigger dividends if the Cupertino, California, company indeed delivers its highly anticipated touchscreen tablet.

While the most obvious beneficiaries would be app developers, a market segment that can also benefit from the new in-app commerce model are people and companies that create content and need to set up shop in a way that doesn't, in effect, charge someone for just walking in - like media publishers.

Newspapers and magazines are reportedly in talks with Apple about repurposing their content onto a "new device", presumably the rumored touchscreen tablet Apple will deliver in early 2010. Numerous reports suggest an Apple tablet would have a strong focus on redefining print media. Enabling in-app commerce through free apps was a crucial move to help make this goal a reality.

# Apple has created at least three separate prototypes of its tablet computer. Let's call it "iPad".
# Version 1 was designed with a 7" screen, which was judged to be too small. The latest version has a 10.7" screen.
# It runs iPhone OS.
# There have been reports that it looks like an iPhone. They're sort of true. It looks like an iPhone 3G, complete with a curved back.
# It will come in two different variations: one with 3G networking capabilities, and one without 3G networking capabilities. Think of the 3G version as a bigscreen iPhone 3GS, and the non-3G version as a bigscreen iPod touch.
# Screen resolutions will obviously jump considerably from the iPhone and iPod touch 480×320-pixel displays, enabling easy reading of full-sized book and magazine pages, plus cropped newspaper pages. Expect something like 5-6 times the resolution of an iPod touch or iPhone screen (720p or thereabouts) and 7 times the touchable surface area.
# It is designed to expand the iPhone and iPod touch media concept to its next potential level: as a slate-like replacement for books and magazines, plus all of the media, gaming, app, and web functionality of the iPhone and iPod touch.
# It is not meant to compete with netbooks. It's an iPhone OS media player and light communication device.
# Apple is currently planning to announce it on or before January 19, 2010, and to use an iPhone-like hype buildup period to start selling it in May or June.
# It is apparently awaiting a final green light from Steve Jobs; chances of it appearing in the market are believed to be 80% at this point.

Last we heard, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wasn't ready to talk about a timeframe for the release of his self-proclaimed "science project", the CrunchPad tablet. That's not the case for The Straits Times, however, who've published an article claiming that developer Fusion Garage is aiming to get the device out to the masses by November of this year, just in time for Christmas shopping. The Singapore newspaper got a sneak preview of the device, as well as some new specs. The tablet reportedly about 2.64 pounds, has a 1.6GH Intel Atom and 1GB RAM (which we knew), a USB port for keyboard and / or mouse, built-in WiFi and 3G connectivity, and a port for mobile broadband. Price is estimated around $400, a little bit more than the $300 he pegged in April, but it's still being filed in the "unconfirmed" category for now -- hopefully it comes out a little leaner when this thing goes official.